Google is an absolutely vital channel for event organizers to rely on. There is no better channel than SEO to provide a targeted way to reach conference-goers and get more ticket sales. With a little bit of SEO knowledge, you can easily reach the first position of search results and sell more tickets to your event.
Why Is SEO Important?
You’ve likely heard of search engine optimization – it’s widely known as SEO, and it’s vital to the success of any event. Research suggests that 89% of conference goers use search to make purchasing decisions.. To give you an idea of how much possible traffic you’re leaving at the door if you don’t optimize your site, 49,500 people search for the term “conference” alone.
This means you can’t leave search out of your marketing stack. Sites that rank first for a particular keyword command 36% of the available search traffic. Click To Tweet Your SEO strategy should be an integral part of your marketing strategy to grow the reach and success of your event and keep one step ahead of your competition.
SEO Is More Of A Strategy, Less Taskwork
It’s a mistake to think that SEO is a one and done task to be completed and forgotten. Something you should know right off the bat– SEO means playing the long-term game. There aren’t any quick tactics that are successful and it can take months or even a year before you notice results.
The work you put into optimizing your site for search traffic will absolutely pay off. Keyword research works to identify the topics that your prospective attendees care about, driving the content marketing you will do that will convert them from prospects into conference advocates.
High SEO ranking on big search sites like Google is integral to remaining competitive online. You can bet that your competitors’ conference organizers are making a push in SEO optimization as well. This is because SEO is always evolving. Search engines constantly update their algorithms to deliver more accurate results.
How to Rank On Google For Your Event
You shouldn’t just assume that because your event exists online that people can find it. You have to take steps to improve your overall visibility and bring much-needed awareness to your event page. Here’s how to get started:
1) Be Strategic with Keywords
Keywords are the terms that prospective attendees search for on Google to find your site and these are the heart of SEO. You’ll want to use these keywords and terms strategically and creatively on your event page- specifically, in your event name and description.
Sometimes this means ditching your creativity and going for a more straightforward name. You can figure out the keywords you should incorporate into your event name by utilizing UberSuggest to conduct your research.
Search engines are intelligent enough to know that events are timely and location-driven, so they will incorporate your event’s date and location into the algorithm to determine your ranking on the search engine. Make sure that your date and location are front and center in your event description. It’s good strategy to repeat geographic terms like ‘New York City’ in your copy where relevant as well.
If you’re directing traffic to your own site for the event, make sure that your URL is also keyword optimized for your event as well.
2) Localize Your SEO Efforts
Like we mentioned above, events are time and location-based. Unlike e-commerce sites that are relevant at any time and place, event pages need traffic at certain times- when registration is open and tickets are on sale.
Not only that, but event pages need to reach people in the right location as well. If your event takes place in Chicago, you want it to rank whenever someone Googles “events this weekend in Chicago.”
3) Choose The Right URL
One of the most important places to optimize for the keywords that will lift your SEO program is your domain name. This should literally be the name of your event.
This is a surefire way to make sure that if someone types your event’s name into Google, your site will come up first.
4) Construct Great Content
As far as ranking on Google is concerned, using keywords to demonstrate your event’s relevance is only half the battle with SEO. The second half is to demonstrate to Google that your site is more helpful and relevant to search users than other sites that rank for the same keywords.
The most effective way to do this is to double down on original content that is valuable to your target users. Google’s algorithms are intelligent enough to pick up on duplicated copy, keyword stuffing, and many other ‘tactics’ that were previously used to manipulate Google’s ranking system.
To avoid the ire of Google and to encourage them to index your page and give you better SEO rankings, produce well-written copy that is written for human readers first and optimized for search engines second. Click To Tweet5) Create Relationships to Build Links and Domain Authority
One of the most important ranking factors that Google uses to analyze the ranking of a site is by looking at the site’s ‘domain authority’ which is an arbitrary number that Google assigns to indicate how much the search engine trusts your site. There isn’t an instant way to improve Domain Authority, but Google trusts sites with regular content and sites that link back to the site.
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